On the face of it, ‘write what you know’ has to be the most restrictive adage to confront the would-be writer. For a start, it rules out most genre writing, assuming you’ve not been involved in a space battle, been hired to find a missing child, or swung your sword against an ogre. And given the amount of dross in genre fiction, maybe that’s not bad advice.

Only, what are we left with at that point? Dreary novels about adultery imagined and not acted on? Definitive accounts of the working lives of architects, suntan technicians and tarmac specialists with a hankering to write a novel? Stories that elevate the mundane into something not really like art? That way lies madness, or at least an endless round of Nick Hornby imitators and tales of dismal childhood…hmm, pretty much what you’ll find an abundance of in book stores.

‘Write what you know’ is not much use taken at face value then. But treated as an endorsement to write what you know about through your emotional life, it releases endless possibilities for writing. I’ve never had an archenemy, but there are a few people in my life I’d have gladly tossed off a waterfall at one point or another. I’ve never colonised an alien planet, but I’ve spent months living in another culture, one where the fact that the language was shared didn’t mean that many assumptions were. I’ve never performed on the main stage at Glastonbury with a band, but I’ve performed poetry as an amateur alongside professionals and been as well received as they were.

Very rarely do the scripts I’ve written correspond with the facts of my life. But more often than not, there are ideas that I’m passionate about, emotions I feel, concepts that matter to me. Those are as much a part of ‘what I know’ as the mere details of my life, and are much more important when it comes to writing.

I’m currently researching a tv drama set in a 1980s counterculture I’ve seen precious little drama about, let alone any that has the right feel when I compare it to my own experiences of that world and the people who inhabited it. My personal experience will be useful as a benchmark, but where the script will come alive is when I combine it with research and a compelling - fictional - story. Sure, there’s a strong element of reality to what I’m writing about, but I’m not devising a documentary and feel no obligation to be restricted to the facts as they’ve been recorded (…and in this instance, some of the relevant information has been expunged from the records of contemporary newspapers with help from security services).

Veracity without drama is lifeless. Drama without emotional veracity is empty. Tread a path where your own emotions inform the choices you make in a story, and you have the capacity to create something interesting. This, by the way, doesn’t mean wallowing in your emotions and using them as an opportunity to lament the end of your relationship with the heartless so-and-so who left you high and dry when you had a fleeting affair with their best friend. That way lies self-indulgence.

The trick here, and I’d recommend meditation classes if it doesn’t come naturally, is to shift between feeling and listening to your emotions as they were at the time, and viewing what happened with empathy for all involved. Approached in that manner, you can create rounded characters for all the parts required, rather than creating an improbably angelic version of yourself and mere puppets for anyone else.

Bloody hell, this writing lark gets pretty complicated, and into some rich psychological and philosophical territory. Well, yes. Enjoy the journey though, and please try to distinguish between a bit of necessary navel gazing and disappearing up your arse.

Irony in screenwriting isn’t about the characters wisecracking in a dry and knowing way. Knowing is part of it, sure, but the knowing in question is the relationship between what the character knows and what the audience know. It’s a dance, and controlling it enables the writer to control pace and tension in the film effectively.

Thrillers in particular work according to who knows what, when. If an audience knows in advance that the sheriff the protagonist opens up to is allied with the bad guys, then everything the sheriff says and does will be loaded with that knowledge. In turn, that creates empathy for the protagonist’s predicament when the sheriff, say, offers to put the hero up in a cell for the night, to save him from his pursuers.

Writing in this manner calls for control of point of view at all times. Always seeing a story from the perspective of one character is one valid choice - others add fascinating complications. In the example just used, if the hero discovers the truth about the sheriff when, the morning after he accepts the offer to stay in the cell, the bad guys turn up, that’s one perfectly valid way of telling the story.

But imagine how much more tension can be wrung out of the situation if you know that the sheriff is in contact with the bad guys, acts sympathetically to the hero, and realises the financial payoff he can make by selling him to the villains. It turns the sheriff from a fairly bland character into one making important choices affecting the hero’s destiny, all the while as the hero accepts the sheriff’s friendship. You can twist it further still: what if the sheriff ultimately decides to side with the hero, even after he’s arranged to sell him to the bad guys? The story options multiply, as the hero is faced with the potential of eluding his pursuers, and he and the sheriff have to concoct a way of him getting away that leaves the sheriff looking as if he still sides with the bad guys.

And so on…The point here is that allowing your story to have several viewpoints allows you to increase the jeapordy of what’s happening in all kinds of interesting ways. And it doesn’t just apply to thrillers. How about a romcom? Let’s say the guy with the hots for the woman is told seconds before they converse for the first time that she despises men of his profession…That gives the scene a frisson it would otherwise have lacked, and reveals something about his character according to the way he responds to this news (does he lie about his job, or defend himself in a way that seems excessive?), just by adding a little piece of dialogue from a third party.

Or horror: a character has been bitten by a vampire, but thinks she won’t become one herself because there was just the one bite. Cut to another scene in which a priest says that vampire victims only become vampires themselves if the bite happened on a full moon, at which point the viewer remembers that the attack did indeed happen when the moon was full in the night sky. In that instance, the audience had the information all along, and it becomes knowledge only in the context of a later revelation.

Alfred Hitchcock was a master at parcelling out information to the audience to hook them into stories and empathise with or change their allegiances to different characters as the film went on. It’s a vital part of the screenwriter’s toolbox, and one which I believe is best learned by experimenting with different ways of approaching the same story. And if you can find a way of doing so that works with Hitchcock’s mastery, then I want to see your script reach the screen.

A lot of people think of character and plot as separate categories. That’s never a view that’s made much sense to me. We know people by their actions, the choices they make, and it’s those actions that create a sense of what kind of people they are.

The pilot episode of Six Feet Under features the death of the family’s undertaker father. The death itself is a revelation of character: he throws a cigarette out of the vehicle window after being chastised by his wife over the phone for smoking, then almost instantly lights another one. As he bends to ignite it, he misses the bus that’s headed towards his hearse, which sends it spinning and him dead. Character is incident.

Next, we get to see his family and their response to this catastrophic event. One son is having sex with a stranger in an airport when he hears the news, and his obvious sorrow leads to a significant story development as the woman he’s banging, who up until now wouldn’t even share her name, agrees to drive him home. The other son is stoic as he takes the news on board, but then lits rip at someone when it all gets too much for him, causing upset. The daughter has just smoked crystal meth for the first time, making it even more difficult to process what’s going on. All choices that reveal character.

People don’t have a consistent character. We change according to context: who we’re with, what we’re doing. Some things may remain consistent, but other facets will become apparent over time. I make full use of this obvious observation in the pilot episode I’ve written for a tv series I’ve devised: one particular character is shown and talked about in a way that suggests she’s ineffective, but it’s just the same character who — barely stopping to think about it — defuses a dangerous situation spontaneously when she’s seen later. Is she a flake? Is she capable? Or does she exhibit different traits at different times?

As well as his LSD exploits, psychologist Timothy Leary devised a very interesting way of looking at people through a model that he described as ‘neurological circuits’. He proposed that there are 8 such circuits, each of which can be distinctively imprinted by formative experiences through our lives. The first governs our perception of the world as safe or dangerous. The second, our relative degree of submission or dominance. The third, our capacity to process logical and symbolic thinking. The fourth, our morality and sexuality. The remaining four circuits are associated with experiences that not everyone recognises, including relationship with time, and capacity to override the ’settings’ of previous circuits.

I find the 8 circuit model a fascinating way of exploring what makes people tick, devoid of the simplistic assumptions of Freudian thinking, overly concerned as they are with sexuality. It’s not ‘true’, but it’s certainly useful, and Leary’s collaborator Robert Anton Wilson writes interestingly — and with practical exercises to bring the model to life — in books including Quantum Psychology and Prometheus Rising.

The beauty of the 8 circuit model is it is a model of character based on behaviour, and not theory. Never mind that your mother took the spoon away, that teacher made you stand outside the staff room: what are you doing and what does that suggest about the interaction of your neurological circuitry? It’s a model that is refreshingly free of value judgment, unlike many other psychological frameworks. As such, I believe it to be a great asset to writers: it’s our job to create convincing characters, not moralise about them…as far as I’m concerned anyway. (A lot more interesting to present a character and their actions in a rounded and honest way, than to paint a halo or horns on them from the word go, I believe: I like characters it’s not easy to pin down, not obvious cyphers for the writer’s preferred worldview.)

Go to a cafe, a bar, or somewhere else you can watch people. What do you see and hear them doing that fits with previous things they’ve done? What does that say about them? What do you see and hear them doing that confounds your expectations? How do you have to update your model to take this new data into account, and what does it suggest about them? It’s in this relationship with your perceptions and models of how people operate that you can see characterisation at work, and the better you get at experiencing people in this way, the more interesting your characters will become, to write and to watch.

Another day, another fascinating thriller with a lot going on. This time it’s Sexy Beast, which I saw tonight for the first time since recognising its homoerotic aspects, and this time came across as a rich dark study of male power and sexuality.

Ray Winstone is Gal, a criminal who’s retired to Spain. Thinks he’s retired, that is. Don Logan, played by Ben Kingsley, has other ideas. Yes, we’re in a ‘one last job’ story, but superbly scripted by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, one which gets inside the minds of some beautifully and convincingly twisted characters.

It all kicks off with Ray Winstone sunning himself outside his hacienda when a boulder comes crashing down the hill and into his pool. It foreshadows Ben Kingsley’s entrance: he’s a psychotic gangster determined to get Ray to take part in a job in London. Only, there’s more to it than that. Before Kingsley sets eyes on Winstone he sees Winstone’s pool boy, the pool itself being symbolic of the love that exists between Gal and his partner Dee (it features a tiled heart design at the bottom). And as the pool’s guardian, the teenager later tries to defend Gal from Don, as well as being the subject of Don’s envy. All subtly painted, but undeniably there.

Don is a gloriously deranged creation, equal parts vile and violent, and wonderfully conflicted about his feelings for Gal. At the very least he resents that Gal has left his mates in the lurch and has no contact with them any more. And there’s plenty more to it, as there is more generally within the underworld that Gal thought he’d left behind. Some of the characters, including Ian McShane, the Mr Big behind the robbery that Don wants Gal to be part of, are bisexual. And when the heist itself takes place, the screen is awash with near-naked men swimming underwater to get the booty they crave.

Sexy Beast is head and shoulders above the empty posturing of the other Brit gangster films that were so prevalent for a while, an incisive and elegant dissection of the intersection of criminality and masculinity. And lest that sound too pompous, it’s also wonderfully directed (by Jonathan Glazer), superbly acted, very funny, and well scored. More than anything, it shows the capacity of genre material to work as a way of exploring big ideas - especially ones that were implicit in older, more naive, takes on storytelling in the same genre.

I’m thinking of thrillers at the moment. Not regulation thrillers where the action purrs like the engine of a high performance car to an inevitable conclusion, but the sort where you’re not quite sure what’s going on at times, and maybe the writer or director have an agenda beyond the base requirements of the genre. Insomnia and Memento would be good examples, and the one I’ve just watched is Inside Man.

Spike Lee is a director I’ve admired without loving for some time, and Inside Man does nothing to consummate our relationship. It starts simply enough with a bank heist masterminded by Clive Owen and investigated by Denzel Washington, and adds layers of complexity as it goes. First, there’s the requisite tricksiness of the heist itself, which leads the crooks to take the bank staff and customers hostage and dress them in identical outfits. That’s interesting, but even more so is the motivation of the bad guys; just what is it they’re up to?

The fact that the cast also includes Jodie Foster tells you that the answers the audience are after probably go above and beyond the bare necessities of a thriller; that is, to thrill the audience. And Spike Lee being the director means that there’s sure to be a larger game afoot, and so it proves. We discover that the bank itself was started with Nazi booty looted from Jews, something that its founder Christopher Plummer would not like made public.

So, there’s the expected stuff around the mechanics of a heist, augmented with some neat business around the crooks bugging the cops, faking the death of a hostage, and so forth. All good fun that keeps you on the edge of your seat. And as the story develops, there is a sense of a bigger game being played. New York’s cultural melting pot is part of the fabric of the story. Racist attitudes to Denzel Washington’s character from a white cop, and to a Sikh hostage whose turban is forcibly removed and is disparagingly called an Arab, form part of a credible social world that Bruce Willis never has to navigate in the Die Hard films.

That element of politics and ethnicity becomes more important as the Nazi aspect of the story is made clear. It’s done with a fairly light touch, and Lee’s own status as an African American director comes into play. How many times have you seen two black cops work together? In almost any other situation, a black cop would be partnered with a white cop, but here Denzel’s character is paired with Chiwetel Ejiofor: it’s no accident.

Inside Man is not brilliant - I sense that the actors are sometimes bringing more to the characters than can be found in the script - but as an intelligent heist movie edging out of the mainstream it’s to be applauded. A brave failure is always more interesting than a mediocre success, and to call it a failure is to exaggerate its weaker points anyway.

Whatever became of the big politically-charged drama? There was a whole agitprop tradition in eighties theatre, and you can look at Boys from the Blackstuff as the humanist continuation of that spirit on television. But where did that current go next?

Bleasdale’s anger, channeled through the searing Blackstuff scripts, was directly provoked by the actions of Margaret Hilda Thatcher. With her out of the way, a lot of that ire went - but where to? The sad truth is that subsequent Labour governments have been an embarrassment to many voters on the left, as the party that created the welfare state has embraced market values and become in many ways indistinguishable from its old opponents. In the process, the Labour party has learned a lot about the media, and as it’s become more savvy about spin, the notion of sincere committed drama seems as old hat and irrelevant as standing up for free school milk.

It’s in that growth of a sophisticated media culture that answers to the question of where political writing has gone can be found. Politics and media have become ever more intertwined, and it’s impossible to treat media with the straight-faced sincerity that led to shows such as When The Boat Comes In, say. A drama about people struggling to get by in the depression as traditional industry declines…can you imagine that on tv now? And on what channel?

So, instead of drama wearing its heart on its sleeve, we have scripts that are inevitably satirical in nature since it’s impossible to do media about media without becoming aware of the ironies involved. The most striking example has got to be The Thick Of It, a dissection of the mechanics of spin and the personalities who practice it that is second to none.

Two names stand out as being able to hold a mirror to the nose of the establishment: Chris Morris and Armando Ianniuci. And it’s the fact that the mirror is held to the nose, for snorting purposes, that creates a problem: this is satire so accurate that it’s indistinguishable from the real thing, and is praised by those it parodies. It also excludes a big chunk of the audience who are not as media-literate as its creators: so how can we get a modern audience to sit through a drama with a political element that isn’t some kind of meta-response to the circus it examines?

The best answer to that comes in the work of Jimmy McGovern and Paul Abbott. Both have a knack for writing drama with a strong social element that is emotionally engaging, clever without being up its arse. McGovern’s been at it longer, and back in his run on Cracker there are some excellent episodes examining the state of the nation while still providing a compelling protagonist and crime hooks. Abbott’s politics started to show through in Clocking Off, a means of exploring the different social worlds orbiting a factory in the north. It was also a sneaky way of bringing back the single play to television, and McGovern has done much the same with the more recent The Street. Scratch Abbott’s Shameless, and you’ll find rich social themes underpinning the comedy-drama, and ones that don’t pay simplistic allegiance to the left: the Gallaghers look after themselves and those around them, and if that means milking the state because it’s systems are so slow and cumbersome, then so be it. You can be feckless, and give a feck.

All of this interests me because I’m about to develop a treatment for a tv drama set around a bit of fairly recent British social history that I find fascinating, and believe has a lot of relevance and resonance for the way we live now. And I’m searching for a way to write it that will allow me to include a whole bunch of necessary research and bring it alive for a modern audience, one that probably didn’t watch Our Friends In The North, but likes Spooks, that’s sort of concerned about CCTV but even more about hoodies, and is just as likely to read The Mail as The Mirror. I know it can be done: the task is to find my way through it to reach that audience and share with them my concerns about the time the story will be set, and how that relates to the world we now inhabit.

I finished a script earlier this evening, and I’m really pleased with it. And particularly as I entered the home stretch, I realised more of what the story is actually about, and realised there was a much more interesting transformative arc there for one of the principle characters than I’d first imagined.

Comics writer Alan Moore sometimes uses the metaphor of high altitude mapping to describe what it’s like assembling a story, and that made sense in this particular case. I put together the characters, themes, and structure in a way that seemed to fit, and then launched into writing the damn thing. And, what do you know - it worked! What’s interesting is the difference between knowing what the story is like from that high altitude perspective, and then the ground level experience of actually writing it.

In the process, I discovered a lot more about some of the characters than I thought I knew. And I hope that the show who those characters belong to agree with my conclusions, since that would increase my chances of selling this sample script to them. In this case, it’s a sample script that’s been requested, rather than being offered out of the blue, so I’m hoping that too will make them see me in a good light.

This is the stage of things where other people get involved, and that’s always an odd one. Right now, I’m very happy with this particular script, and feel it fits the bill for the show it’s aimed at. In reality, the feedback I’ll get will almost certainly point out ways that I’ve strayed from the path, in their eyes, and more than likely when I receive that news I’ll be inclined to agree with it. Time gives distance.

But, this very second, I am more than happy with the work I’ve done. And that’s something important to hold onto: something I aim for in everything I write is for it to be as good an example of what it is as it can possibly be. You’re on a hiding to nothing if every time you set about writing you aim for Nobel status, but if instead you aim for an attainable personal goal, then you can reach it, maybe even surpass it.

For instance, the play Breaking In that you’ll find on this site is my crack at writing a decent two-hander play, and I reckon I did the job…as did the audiences who saw it. My Hellblazer comic script is my stab both at writing for that title, and at using colour in narrative ways within a comic. And so on: set yourself an achievable goal, and you can look forward to reaching it - decide that nothing less than, say, being the next James Joyce will satisfy you and you’re much more likely to end up dissatisfied.

Naturally, having finished some writing, I figure I deserve a treat. So I splashed out on Amazon, seeing good deals on seasons of The Wire and The Shield I don’t have. Not that all my wants are American. Far from it: I’m waiting for the price to come down on Party Animals, last year’s sharply written drama about MPs’ research assistants, and recently picked up Boys From The Blackstuff for £10.

All this self-congratulatory stuff is bringing to mind The Shamen’s old positivist anthem, Pro Gen, from where this post gets its title. Whoever would have thought I’d be quoting Mr C in a blog on screenwriting?

How do you bring new life to a theme or genre that’s tired? One answer is to bring new influences in, the tack that the makers of the Daniel Craig version of Casino Royale took when they wheeled out the James Bond franchise for its latest iteration. The speed and action of the film that resulted clearly owed something to the massive success of The Bourne Identity and its sequels, films which successfully redefined what a spy franchise can do in the post-Berlin Wall and post-Twin Towers era.

Horror films have been faced with a similar dilemma. There’s a danger that werewolves and vampires and other monster staples can feel hackneyed, so what else can be brought to the table? One route is to explicitly explore the horrors that people are capable of inflicting on one another, which was handled with pathos and credibility in Wolf Creek but unfortunately also led to a host of crappy torture porn films such as Hostel and Saw.

But what if you’re still attracted to the old style monsters? Ginger Snaps demonstrated that intelligent ideas about female adolescence could be brought to a werewolf film, in a story that in its own way did for the werewolf what comics writer Alan Moore did for a whole host of horrors in his socially aware run on Swamp Thing.

And now, writer Brandon Seifert and artist Lukas Ketner have reinvigorated the horror comic anew with their title WitchDoctor. In essence, it’s House in a horror setting; the rare conditions explored by the magical medical specialist are vampirism and other forms of monstrosity, framed in a quasi-scientific way that’s a lot of fun to read. The creators have put their demo episode up at www.witchdoctorcomic.com in the hope of attracting publishers, and I wish them luck: it’s a sparky and well-executed concept that’s got the potential to inhabit its own very particular niche with style.

As for how to go about reinvigorating your own concept with the energy of fresher ideas, first look at your core story and decide whether it really does merit the time you’re going to spend on it. If it does, and it’s a new take you’re interested in, check out possible role models by exploring their style and structure: what can you borrow from, say, the new take on Dr Who that will help you to write your proposed security guard drama serial? If it’s family-friendliness, then how exactly does Dr Who manage to attract an audience of whole families, and what of that approach can you emulate in your own script?

This method isn’t, hopefully, about copying: if you learn well from a role model you can incorporate elements of their own success into yours in a way that transcends ripping off. And if not, then so be it; just bear in mind Tom Lehrer’s words: ‘Plagiarise/Let noone else’s work evade your eyes’.

There’s a certain amount of terminology encountered in the world of screenwriting, some of it useful and some of it like the jargon of other fields seemingly meant more to determine who’s an insider and who’d like to be. One of the more useful term bandied about is ‘character arc’. And what that does, as it suggests, is describe the transition of a character from the start of a story to its climax.

You’d think that the genre of the film is one of the bigger factors in determining the nature of the particular arc, and to some extent you’d be right. But perhaps the most useful way of plotting the arc of whatever character you’re wanting to write is to think through what they want and what they need.

Want vs need sets up a dynamic that propels the character through the story. And it can be resolved in one of several ways. A character can have what they want, but not what they need, and be ignorant of this. Or, they can have what they want, not what they need, and realise that they’ve fallen short - you can milk a lot of tragedy out of this one. Alternatively, they can get what they need, but not what they want, which is a classic way of showing maturation. Or if they’re lucky fucks, they get what they want and a side-order of what they need.

Those are the ways it breaks down, but it helps to log it in with some specifics. Let’s say your heroine wants to be a lawyer, but needs to have a better relationship with her sister. If she got what she was after, we’re headed for some kind of tragedy - it’s the curse that afflicts the protagonist of There Will Be Blood, who gets to be a big oil tycoon but loses everyone around him in the process. And that can happen one of two ways: with or without self-knowledge. Realising you’ve got what you wanted but sensing there’s something more can make life awful hollow.

Or, lets say she gets what she needs: one way is for her to make a go of being a lawyer, and realising she was only doing it to compete with her high-flying sister, maybe, and that their relationship matters more than the ulcers she’d get pursuing a job where she gets her name in gold letters on the door. Alternatively, she gets to be a lawyer and by acting as her sister’s legal representative, the two become tight once more.

Get it? From the simple dynamic inherent in wants vs needs, you can do all sorts of useful speculation about the story you’re interested in, and follow the route that’s got the most dramatic potential. And why not get fancy with it? This heuristic (rule of thumb) can be applied not just to overall character arcs, but to what happens in specific scenes, helping to give them some richness they might otherwise lack if you’re thinking purely in terms of getting from A to B.

Anyway, off to contemplate my own wants and needs, since I want breakfast and need to lose weight, and I’ve been told that today is not a day for dieting by the friend I’m visiting for lunch…decisions, decisions…

So, it looks like one particular project has fizzled.  A director I know had chanced on $250,000 American investment, and approached me about writing a feature tailored to work to that budget.  After a false start, we decided it would be best to work on a single location thriller, and I came up with an embryonic treatment that I was and remain proud of.

There’s no regret attached to the fact that the project seems to have fizzled out.  But there is about the way that the fizzling happened: after a few weeks when the director and I were in regular contact, I have heard nothing for nearly two months.  No replies to my phone calls, nor to the text I sent enquiring about the status of the project.  Not much of a finale then, and certainly no sense of class about it.  But, I am not despondent: I still have the bones of a thriller I’d love to write, and now I can take it forward with other parties.  And next week I have a meeting with some very credible producers who’ve already made one multiple award winning feature, and have more films in the pipeline.  We were going to be talking about one particular project of mine they’ve been interested in for a while, and now I’ll be able to discuss the low budget thriller too. 

So, I get to stay happy: I’m not sure I can say the same about the director of the project that seems to have crashed and burned who, from my sense of him, is perhaps embarrassed that he wasn’t able to deliver the goods and feels he can’t face up to me.  Maybe, maybe not: I’m not going to waste mental energy on speculating.

The feature that these particular producers are interested in is one that’s close to my heart, being drawn from traumatic personal experience that I believe I’m distant enough from at this point to be able to write about well.  I’ve tried writing the same piece before, but at that point it didn’t work out.  Now, with time having passed and my skills sharper, I believe I can do it justice.  We shall see.

I also had a very interesting meeting with a woman who wants me to write a screenplay based in large part on her own life story.  Which, since she is a medium by trade, promises to be an interesting tale.  Mediumship is a field I have no fixed opinions on save that I am deeply sceptical about the showbiz end of the market, where middle aged men living with their mothers ask a packed hall if anyone knows someone called David, or is that Dick, or maybe Dennis?  A world away from the medium I met, a charming if dotty woman who was very sincere, clearly dedicated to her calling, and promises to be someone interesting to spend time with.  She also acted out the story beautifully, having to do so because her severe dyslexia limits her ability to communicate with the written word alone.  If we can make the finances of this particular endeavour work, it’s one I’d very much like to take on.

This business aspect of what I get up to may be of some interest to at least some of you: the trick, which I have yet to manage convincingly, is to get a number of projects funded by various sources on the go, and thus add to the pile of completed projects awaiting further development.  If that commitment to screenplays, whether originated by myself or others, can be combined with television commissions, then the consequence is, financially at least, happiness.  In practice, for now at least, other means of earning money must be factored into the equation.  But with possibilities including the BBC Writers Academy on the horizon, and a sample script requested by a primetime show that could result in regular work, the picture could change substantially within the next few months.  The best approach seems to be not to get too attached to any one outcome, instead concentrating more on a direction that will itself generate increasing possibilities.  And if that means the prospect of finding a home for one particular concept decreases for a while, then so be it: another opportunity will appear in due course.